Wednesday Mini OT: Ocean's Second, AI Beats Tariffs, Lotus Promises A Car, $2K Oil Change?
All readers welcome
Hello, friends. I’m traveling this week and have been busier than I expected. So we will have some extra content on Friday to make up for it. In the meantime, let’s have a Mini OT. As always, interesting topics will be pinned.
Lots of trouble, usually serious
Lotus will return to the ICE supercar business in 2028 with a new hybrid V8 model expected to be called Esprit that is aimed to rival cars including the Ferrari 849 Testarossa.
The supercar’s hybrid powertrain will be centred around a new V8 engine supplied by Renault-Geely powertrain division Horse. Total power output will exceed 986bhp, confirmed Lotus.
The new supercar will be built alongside the Lotus Emira sports car at Hethel, in a boost for Lotus’s historical base in Norfolk.
The new car, which is codenamed Esprit, takes inspiration from 2024’s Theory 1 electric supercar concept. A teaser shot of the rear of the production car released by Lotus (below) shows the striking similarity with the concept, with the addition of two massive exhaust pipes.
Lotus has been collaborating with Horse in the development of the turbocharged V8, which is expected to set a new benchmark in power-to-weight ratios.
“Since we will be starting from scratch with this engine, we will make a lot of effort to improve the volume and also the weight of the engine,” Lotus CEO Feng Qingfeng said in a statement.
The new supercar will be a hybrid rather than a plug-in hybrid in order to save weight, bucking the recent trend to shift to PHEV drivetrains for supercars in cars such aAls the Aston Martin Valhalla, Lamborghini Temerario and Ferrari 296 GTB. Removing the need to plug in to charge allows Lotus to reduce the size of the battery and not fit charging-related componentry.
Ah, yes, Lotus is back with its traditional mix of hybrid power, an engine by “Horse”, and a CEO named after an Amazon USB charger brand. Still. If this means the Emira gets a longer lease on life and the Hethel folks arrest their slide into battery-powered irrelevance, who’s to complain?
Aliens and immigrants, now with a TED talk
When Neal Katyal won a coin flip against Pratik Shah and was given a slam-dunk, completely-prearranged, utterly-corporate-corrupt “win” against President Trump’s tariffs at the Supreme Court, he did what American attorneys and legal experts have done since the beginning of time: he used it as an opportunity to make a series of advertisements for an AI legal product.
Milbank partner Neal Katyal raised eyebrows this week with a new TED Talk revealing his use of an AI tool to prepare to argue against President Donald Trump’s tariffs at the US Supreme Court.
Katyal, a former acting solicitor general who has presented more than 50 cases before the court, argued the case in November after winning a coinflip over another advocate, Akin’s Pratik Shah. The court ultimately ruled 6-3 in favor of the coalition of businesses challenging the global tariffs.
“I walked up to that mahogany podium, and I won,” Katyal said in the talk, released Thursday, before revealing what he described as his secret weapon in prepping for the case—a “bespoke AI system” trained on 25 years of Supreme Court papers that was able to predict not just the justices’ questions, but their eventual opinions.
It’s unusual to see an advocate like Katyal take such personal credit for a win at the Supreme Court, and his remarks prompted pushback from court watchers, particularly considering the case in question involved multiple elite law firms and dozens of amicus briefs.
a) fuck this idiot sideways, he was nothing but a compliant tool for the Uniparty’s inexorable and irresistible demand that the spice must flow;
b) imagine thinking the world cares about how you “won” a case that couldn’t be lost.
The best response I’ve seen so far is this:
In a Tweet, Katyal boasted that “AI can’t read the room”, and that such a skill was something he possessed in abundance. Judging (ha) by the way he has been dragged and lampooned by his peers and the world at large, maybe he’d have been better off letting the AI do it.
Singing to the ocean, I can hear the ocean’s roar
I wasn’t aware of this, but the bulk of the abandoned Fisker Oceans were sold to a shop in New York City that uses them for taxis. I’m in the city this week and they are everywhere. Normally I wouldn’t tell you to read InsideEVs but this was done by my friend Raphael Orlove:
They are some of the most advanced cars on the road, but it’s an old brick building on a side street in the Bronx where Fisker Oceans go to get serviced to join New York City’s for-hire car fleet.
When electric vehicle startup Fisker went bankrupt in 2024, a fleet operator called American Lease saw an opportunity to serve the rideshare world in a place where it’s rapidly going all-electric. The company bought up the remaining stock of its vehicles, around 3,000 Ocean SUVs.
American Lease spent around $42.5 million to buy the cars at a fair market rate of around $13,000 each, according to bankruptcy documents. It then rents them out for as low as $399 a month to Uber and Lyft drivers. As you read this, they’re picking up fares in New York right now.
It’s neat to see them on the road. Between that and the surprising number of Lucid Air sedans being used as “black cars”, there’s a genuinely futuristic aspect to New York at the moment. Let’s hope the Oceans keep, ah, rolling.
Source: trust me, bro
Scotty Reiss is claiming that a Mercedes-Benz dealer charged a friend of hers $2,000 for an oil change on a new GLA. There was probably a time when an obviously imaginary story like that would have “gone viral” for her without causing any blowback. But now she has people from Mercedes-Benz asking to name and shame the dealership.
Which, unsurprisingly, she just doesn’t feel comfortable doing.
It always makes me laugh to see autowriters briefly put on a Consumer Protection Cap. Because it is always the dealers at the receiving end of their wrath. And why not? Dealers don’t give out free stuff or pay for your travel. In the meantime, uh, watch out for those $2,000 oil changes. They’re totally real.